1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic watches, and more particularly to an electronic watch of the type having hands, a gear train driving the hands, and a stepping motor driving the gear train, the gear train including a counter wheel provided with position-indicating means cooperating with a movable detecting member connected to a detection circuit and to a counter, the detecting member being capable of causing the transmission of signals in the detection circuit when the counter wheel rotates.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Electronic watches of this type have already been proposed. Thus, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,855,781, the movable detecting member is intended to detect the rotation of the gear train whenever a pulse is supplied to the motor. The position-indicating means consist here of peripheral teeth on the counter wheel, these teeth cooperating with a jumper-type element fixed to the end of the detecting member. Furthermore, U.S. Pat. No. 3,553,957 likewise describes an electronic timepiece equipped with a detecting device. In this case, however, the design of the device involves electric contacts between a movable disk and fixed electrodes, so that the reliability of the device is not ensured. Its functions are only randomly performed. Because of the lack of reliability of prior art rotation detectors, their practical application in commercially available watches has not yet been possible on a large scale.
Yet development studies in connection with electronic watches having displays with hands has led the manufacturers of such watches to provide them with increasingly sophisticated functions, and it appears that the inclusion of a rotation detector in the gear train of such an electronic watch is likely to furnish the prerequisites for a great many highly diversified and very interesting applications which considerably broaden the range of possibilities for adding new functions to watches. Thus, the use of a movable detector of geartrain rotation is useful not only for automatically making up steps accidentally lost by the motor, for example, but also for performing certain setting functions, or data-storage functions in a memory circuit, or still other functions.